Does she get stabbing knife pains in her feet when she walks?Originally Posted by crystalmoonshin
Does she get stabbing knife pains in her feet when she walks?
Yup. Just your description right there made me well up.
For me too, that's the saddest book I've read. And especially because she was so young when she wrote it.
Saddest has to be Patrick McCabe's 'Butcher Boy' while the most depressing is without doubt 'Tess of the Durbevilles'.
The ending of Steinbeck's 'East of Eden' nearly had me in tears, and also i remember a very dark book called 'Scar Culture' by Toni Davidson which i read about ten years ago when i was 15 which really upset me. Think i will re-read it.
The Disney Version ended happily, whereas the Hans Christian Anderson one is sad, and even that is, according to some scholars, a softer version of a more depressing story.
Last edited by JBI; 01-05-2009 at 05:54 PM.
How about 'On the beach' By Neville Shute? A community getting ready for a radiation cloud to hit them, by giving their gardens a last tidy up and buying a suicide pill for each family member.
The most depressing?
How about Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.
The most recent hopeless and depressing book I read was "Os caminhos a Fome" of Jorge Amado. But it's also a fascinating account of misery and exploitation of some of the poorest people in Brazil in the beginning of the 20th century.
Somehow, I can't find how the novel was translated in English...
...As a moth mistakes a bulb
for the moon, and goes to hell...
-Tom Waits-
Disney were going to do a darker version in the early 50's where she dies.
Doctor Zhivago
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Where the Red Fern Grows
And my personal favorite, Cyrano de Bergerac...good for laughs and cries. You might not like it's overblown, larger-than-life style, but if you do, the ending is absolutely tragic. I still cry when I read the last act.
One of the best German writers of the 19th century was Theodore Fontane and the end to his book Der Stechlin is devastating.
It concerns an old German family who own land in East Prussia and, towards the end of the novel, the Lord of the Manor takes pity on a poor little girl who has an unhappy life with her woodsman father who works on the estate. The old landowner tells her she is welcome to visit him whenever she is unhappy, even though the rest of the family want nothing to do with such a lowly being and do their best to ignore her. The landowner dotes on the child whenever she visits him and they become great friends. Then the old man dies and, as the stone is dropped into place in the family vault where has just been interred, the congregation hear a whimper at the door of the church and turn to see the ragged little urchin standing there and she says in her rough dialect "Now it's finished and I must go away" and she runs crying among the gravestones back to the woods.
I was completely crushed when I read it.
Eugene Onegin, I think.
com-pas-sion (n.) [ME. & OFr. <LL. (Ec.) compassio, sympathy < compassus, pp. of compati, to feel pity < L. com-, together + pali, to suffer] sorrow for the sufferings or trouble of another or others, accompanied by an urge to help; deep sympathy; pity
Dostoevsky Forum!
The old man and the sea. The world should be made out of Santioago's
What transforms this world is — knowledge. Do you see what I mean? Nothing else can change anything in this world. Knowledge alone is capable of transforming the world, while at the same time leaving it exactly as it is.
- Hiraoka Kimitake
"The princess who believed in fairy tales"
I bought this book because I thought it was about some kind of character at the medieval times who believed everything was possible... or something like that...
But it ended up being some kind of self-help book o.O I finished reading it with so much effort! Has anyone read it too?? :S
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